SEO for Franchises - Subdomains or Folders?

[SeoJaz]

Wondering if there ever has been any recent consensus on best SEO strategy for a Franchise.

I feel it is safe to assume that just having one corporate website with a "store locator" that just brings up the address, phone and hours of a location is not optimal.  Yes, the important thing is to get a Google Places for Business listing for each location so you can come up in the 3-pack and regular Maps result, BUT, the rankings for the 3-pack is largely determined by the site's authority and relevance to the specific search term used, IN ADDITION TO, the proximity of the business to the search user's physical location.

Apparently it is widely believed that domain authority does not transfer from www.mycorporatedomain.com to somecity.mycorporatedomain.com.

And of course we also know there is a potential for a duplicate content penalty, so you can't just duplicate your main site for a number of locations and change the address and phone number on the contact page.

If the products and or services are identical for each location, then it's going to be somewhat ridiculous to try and rewrite many sections of the website since the information is no different despite the location.

It seems in general more people are advocates of putting location pages or micro-sites in a subfolder of the corporate domain so that it can benefit from the domain's authority.

HOWEVER, it is also widely known that the home page (root URL) of any domain carries more weight in the eyes of Google.

So let's assume the best strategy is to create a micro-site where phone and address is different anywhere they appear and the contact page is customized to that location, and the "Meet The Staff" page is customized to that location.  The site uses the same style 'template' if you will as the main site.

Let's also assume you can build a custom home page that has some different content, but still shares the same look and some of the same information as the main site.  But let's say between the different phone, address, and maybe some different images and 20% of the content rewritten a bit, Google doesn't view it as dupe content.

So would the best strategy then be to have the location home page be:  somecity.mycorporatedomain.com and the product and services pages that are identical to the main site you just use a rel canonical to point to the main site? Or, do you make the "home page" for the local business be a subfolder of the main site.

So I guess what it boils down to is whether or not the domain authority has more of an effect compared to having a unique home page on a subdomain.

What about this?  Say the only thing different on the local site is the contact (phone/address) in the header and/or footer of every page, the contact form page, and the meet the staff page.  All other content is identical to the corp site, including the home page.  I think in that case you need to use a script to serve the pages dynamically.  So you would need to server the pages using a PHP script that detects the subfolder name to determine the location and dynamically replaces the phone and address and server different contact and staff pages.  You could have a vanity domain mycity.mycorporatedomain.com that does a 301 redirect to the subfolder home page. (This is all ofcourse assuming the subfolder method is the way to go.)

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There SEOJaz,

As you mentioned the word 'optimal' my own description of this would be:

1. A single website representing the brand

2. A store locator linking to an excellent set of landing pages representing the physical locations of the brand. These pages feature unique, compelling content and good CTAs.

3. A submenu or sitemap somewhere on the site linking to these landing pages to sure they are indexable.

And that's it.

When we start throwing subdomains, 20% different content and micro-sites into the game, what you typically wind up with is confusion, mistakes, content of less than sterling quality and marketing efforts having to be spread too thin across an ecosystem of properties instead of being poured into a single, very strong, branded website.

What I've described is optimal, but I'm not sure I've answered your questions...